Bagels: Salt Faults.

Hello, hello. It has been an incredibly long time since I have posted on this thing, mostly due to overwork and a lack of time to use the internet (or, of course, bake). However, last week caught me in a rare free period, so I made some bagels. I can't seem to convince the above picture to upload vertically, but you get the general idea.

I took this recipe from The Fresh Loaf, where you can find specific instructions. The bulk ingredients you'll need are:

1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast
7 3/4 cups flour
2 3/4 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons malt powder
A pinch of baking soda for the water in which y

As a heads up: I found that this recipe yields a LOT of dough. If you want huge bagels, go ahead and divide the dough into 12 pieces, as specified on the Fresh Loaf. I found that 16 bagels was just right for getting breads of manageable size.

The salt is important! Don't use too little. I skimped, using the amount of salt that I happened to have left, and was met with disaster when all the bagels went stale literally overnight. This is a dry, dry, DRY dough, and the salt is your one hope, especially if you're baking in a dry climate (the dormitory in which I live is barely inhabitable).

Aside from being quick to dry out, the bagels were fantastic. I brought two to the dining hall for Sunday brunch as soon as they were cool enough to eat, and covered them both with cream cheese. It was impossible to resist eating another as a bedtime snack.

Friendly Sourdough

Last week I baked the "Norwich Sourdough" as described at Wild Yeast Blog. In general, I am quite pleased with how it turned out, and I'd like to make it again. For some reason, during baking, the side of each loaf exploded and high-fived the other one, leaving me with one big, connected, and very friendly loaf.

For some reason, whenever I bake sourdough, my loaf-scoring never quite works and the loaves always explode on the side. It will probably take many attempts and experiments until I can tame this problem.

The way in which my sourdough rises and bakes is slightly different from the other yeast breads I have tried. It takes much longer to rise, and the dough has more and larger air holes than instant or dry active yeast breads seem to at the same hydration levels. It tastes delicious, too.

For information on the starter I used, click here.

Peter Reinhart's Baguettes

As the above picture indicates, I recently received a multitude of wonderful new baking tools. Among them was Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. If you are a serious bread baker, this book deserves serious consideration. I think it might be my most important baking resource.

After reading over Reinhart's richly detailed twelve-step description of the breadmaking process, I had to try one of his recipes. I decided on baguettes, which rise with a pâte fermentée (dough made the night before baking) in conjunction with traditional baker's yeast. Although I had some problems while proofing (as usual), these turned out better than any baguettes I've made before. Here's how I did it:

Ingredients for the pâte fermentée:

5 oz all purpose flour
5 oz bread flour
0.19 oz salt
0.055 oz instant yeast
6-7 oz water

Mix the dry ingredients, then add the water and mix with a spoon or dough scraper. Reinhart suggest to err on the sticky side, if the hydration does not seem correct. Knead the dough for about five minutes and place it in an oiled bowl. Let it rise for about an hour, then knead lightly for a minute to degas and put it back in the bowl for overnight refrigeration.

Ingredients for the dough:

16 oz. pâte fermentée
5 oz all purpose flour
5 oz bread flour
0.19 oz salt
0.055 oz instant yeast
6-7 oz water

Remove the pâte fermentée from the refrigerator and divide it into ten parts. Let them sit for about an hour, until they aren't quite so cold.


Mix the dry ingredients together and incorporate the pâte fermentée chunks. Add the water, but make sure it is at approximately 90 degrees. Mix until the dough is tacky, but not too sticky, and knead for ten minutes.


Let it rise for about two hours in an oiled bowl at room temperature, then divide it into three baguette shapes and proof for 45 minutes or less. I proofed in a couche made out of a tea towel. I think the dough was over-risen, or perhaps over-proofed: when I tried to slash the loaves for baking (after only twenty minutes of proofing) they instantly collapsed into a wrinkly mess.


Preheat the oven to 500. Bake these guys for 10 minutes, then turn them 180 degrees and set the oven down to 450. Bake for another 10-20 minutes, until the bread's inside temperature is 205 degrees. I used my typical steam setup, which includes a steam pan in conjunction with wall-misting for the first few minutes of baking. Reinhart also recommends this setup.

I know that baguette trays are not "proper" for authentic French baguette making, but we have one around the house now and I decided to try it out. The loaves look a little silly covered in dots, but the crust is consistently crispy all the way around (the holes on the middle loaf are from my food thermometer).


In spite of my proofing error, the baguettes possess a multitude of air-hole sizes and have a soft, creamy crumb. This is probably the most successful bread I've made, taste-wise.

It's Still Alive

No, I haven't forgotten about this blog. It's still very much alive; however, final exams are impeding my baking development a little bit. My sourdough starter is alive and kicking as well: the above photo is the fully risen starter sitting on top of a stack of my exam notes.

After Friday, I'll be finished with exams, and the serious baking can commence once again. I'll be in DC briefly but will probably do some baking there, and if all goes well, my return home will bring all kinds of new treats to the board: expect to see different kinds of sourdough starters, a makeshift brick oven, and much more.

Until then, au revoir.

Started a Starter!

Tonight I started my very own sourdough starter, shown above, held by my wonderful (but shy) assistant. This starter is based on the recipe at Mike Avery's amazingly informative Sourdough Home website. I used 3/8 cup Hodgson Mill rye flour, along with 1/4 cup pineapple juice bought at the local market. According to both Sourdough Home and noted bread author Peter Reinhart, pineapple juice inhibits the growth of leuconostoc, a bacteria that will act (falsely) like yeast during the starter's early stages. Supposedly leuconostoc problems occur more with wheat-based starters, but to be safe, I chose to use pineapple juice anyway.

I hope that the starter matures and becomes useful during the time between classes ending and finals beginning. Serious sourdough will be made, as gifts for teachers and snacks for the ride from Gambier to DC.

Musings On No-Knead Bread

I know that many of you out there in the internet world have tried baking the now-legendary New York Times No-Knead Bread. If you're like me, you lugged out a cast-iron pot and went to town, probably with glorious results. Jim Lahey's technique works. However, during a recent perusal of the archives over at Farmgirl Fare, I learned that this bread need not be placed in a pot at all. This opens up tremendous new possibilities, such as making oversize batches of dough and baking three or four loaves at a time. I tried it at home, yielding the above results.

This bread had a less defined shape and looser crumb than my efforts inside the pan. Also, for some reason, much more flour stuck to the crust of the bread this time, resulting in a drier, thicker crust than most of my previous attempts. That, however, is probably a mixing snafu and not a baking issue. To solve these problems, I will try baking the no-knead bread outside of the pot again, but try to get plumper, more even loaves during chafing and perhaps experiment with different water percentages. Sometimes the no-knead bread has an open yet bizarrely wet and heavy crumb.

Stuffed White Wine-Rosemary Focaccia

So, I was just home for Thanksgiving break. If Thanksgiving was any indication of what Christmas will be like, a baking whirlwind may end up annihilating my parents' kitchen. I baked four different kinds of loaves this past week, and I'd like to highlight here what I believe to be my greatest success.

When I heard that some special guests would be coming over for dinner on the night before thanksgiving, I poked around the kitchen to see what equally special ingredients I could pull up. We have an enormous rosemary plant on our back porch, as well as a truly gargantuan sage bush out front. I couldn't use the sage because my mother recently used a highly toxic fertilizer to stop an aphid problem, but the rosemary was mine for the taking. So, I grabbed a bottle of white wine, some olive oil, and two eight-inch stalks of rosemary in order to make this bread.


This particular recipe calls for a fairly standard dough at first: two teaspoons of yeast are added to 1/2 cup water, which is put into a well in 3 1/2 cups flour to sponge for 20 minutes. After the sponge is risen and frothy, add 1/3 cup white wine, 1/3 cup olive oil, and a generous handful of fresh rosemary to the well and incorporate the remaining flour until all is part of the dough. Knead for ten minutes, and place in an oiled bowl to rise for an hour.

Once the dough has risen, divide it in two, and chafe each part for about five minutes (to chafe, cup your hands around the dough and spin it briskly but gently in one direction so that the dough becomes a ball). After chafing, roll each piece of dough out into a round approximately ten inches in circumfrence and half an inch thick.


Put the first round on a lightly oiled baking sheet or baking stone. Cover this round with mozarella, gorgonzola, fresh basil, roasted peppers, or whatever other delicious treats your kitchen provides.


Put the second round on top of the first, and lightly pinch around the dough to create a seal. This step is important; I was slightly sloppy in one spot and had a pretty serious cheese detonation in the oven.


Bake that business for about 45 minutes. I put an ice tray in the oven and squirt the walls with water in order to get a crispy crust. I really like the crust that olive oil-enriched bread gets; it's light and flaky, like a butter crust, but vegan and lactose intolerant-friendly. The olive oil is probably way healthier than butter, anyway.

Once the focaccia was finished, we divvied it up and had a feast.